You Lose 30 Minutes Of Your Life Every Day You Eat Steak

In an effort to convince people to make healthier life decisions, researcher David Spiegelhalter, of the University of Cambridge, has developed a way of analyzing all our habits — good and bad — into what he calls "microlives."

These figures give the amount of time lost or gained by an activity or action, such as smoking, drinking, or eating fruits and veggies.

Each microlife is equal to a half hour of life expectancy, as a way to communicate what are called "chronic risks" — aka the results of your bad habits.

"People tend to dismiss effects that are perceived to lie in the distant future. As author Kingsley Amis said, 'No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare,'" Spiegelhalter writes in the paper, published today, Dec. 17, in BMJ, a journal of the British Medical Association. "But the loss of one year over 45 years is 1/45th, which pro-rated is roughly one week a year or half an hour per day."

Here are some microlife equivalents for everyday habits, from the paper (these are based over a lifetime habit):

Smoking 15-24 cigarettes per day = minus 5 hours of life (-10 microlives) per day